So what are these things that we call beliefs? They are suppressed doubts. Suspended disbeliefs. Ultimately, it is possible to doubt everything, and I am claiming that doubt is the null hypothesis--the natural state of affairs. What we require in order to operate in this world is the ability to suspend or suppress our doubts. Everything that we believe or know is a proposition that has met some burden of proof.

Hmmm...I would have thought that the "natural state of affairs" is somethnig else, not doubt.  Doubt is a developed trait, isn't it?  I thought it more natural just to soak in things until you become more critical in your thoughts, ei - maturity?

I believe that I closed the garage door today when I left the home, but that is the wrong way of looking at it. In reality, my doubt that I closed the garage door is suppressed--cancelled out by the memory of closing that door.

Interesting.  But how can I start out with a doubt when I know that the garage door isn't closed?  When I close the garage door, then I know that I closed the garage door - unless I have lapsing memory -  then doubt may arise because I couldn't remember if I closed the garage door?

Anyways, I think I got the reasons why you have suspended disbelief in the supernatural.

You got that backwards. I don't suspend disbeliefs. I suppress them

Ooops..my bad.  I meant it to mean what you said, though.

Hmm...I'll have to ponder your last post.

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A belief is always the suppression of a doubt. A doubt is not the suppression of a belief. There is a psychological asymmetry there.

Given this definition of belief, what do you propose to be valid reasons for supressing doubt?  How does one determine what is or is not a valid reason for supressing doubt?  And finally, to what extent are these valid reasons universal?

Very good questions.  I don't think that we ever do fully suppress or inhibit our doubts, but some get inhibited more strongly than others through reinforcement--positive experiences that result from the inhibitions.  The more times the sun rises, the easier it is to suppress the doubt that it will.  So corroborative experiences aid in the suppression of doubt.  Inhibition can be weak or strong.  

You spoke of "valid reasons" for suppressing doubt, but I don't see it as completely a logical process.  I see the suppression of doubt as facilitating the suppresson of other doubts.  For example, if I doubt that any gods exist, that strengthens my doubt that the Christian god exists.  If I manage to suppress the doubt that gods exist, then that makes it easier to suppress the doubt that a particular god exists.  

I don't want to say that it is impossible to believe contradictions, because humans clearly do.  People's beliefs are not always consistent.  In my terms, that can happen when you have conflicting partially suppressed doubts.  For example, I can doubt that the garage door is open, and I can doubt that it is closed.  Failure to suppress one of those doubts asymmetrically creates a paradox.  But why should such a thing not be very natural in a human brain?  After all, we know that parts of the brain can operate independently of each other.  Not only do people have multiple personality disorders, but two separate minds appear when the corpus callosum is severed--one for each side of the body.  So people can hold contradictory beliefs.

Logic has to do with the consistency of beliefs.  Logical operations are truth-preserving manipulations of symbols.  My claim is that doubt is universal.  "Believe nothing" is standard operating procedure.  Beliefs emerge through the suppression of doubt, and suppression is a scalar concept.  That is, our doubt is weakened, but not necessarily totally suppressed, by experiences that contradict it.  Logic, then, is nothing more than a strengthener of doubt-inhibition.  It helps us do establish an asymmetric suppression of doubt.  Logic is not the sole determinant of what we come to lose disbelief in.  In theory, though, we can inhibit doubts that conflict with each other.

I know that what I am saying sounds counterintuitive--ass-backwards of what we normally think.  However, I am trying to establish a psychologically sound picture of how belief works in our minds, and I think that this is the way it really works on a cognitive level.  It explains why "burden of proof" is a standard operating procedure for licensing almost everything that we believe to be true.  Religious belief requires an intensive indoctrination during childhood (and not necessarily indoctrination by parents, but by society) in order to suppress the natural doubt that gods exist.  Indoctrination must be strong in order to overcome our need for "burden of proof", and maybe that explains why those with deep religious belief react so strongly to those who try to re-establish the natural predominance of doubt.

You are very wise corpernicus.  That is why i read your post to become more wise.

In regards to this, I'd like to add that belief and doubt are two sides of the same coin, most of the time. For example, if you believe there is a God, then you doubt that there is no God; if you believe there's no God, you doubt that there is one. Belief begets doubt, doubt begets belief; sometimes you get stuck in the middle, but even there you have belief (like MY belief that it'd be foolish and premature to believe in anything one way or the other until I've done sufficient investigating, for example) and doubt (like my doubt that it'd be a good idea to reject YEC before I've investigated it, despite certain individuals' incredulity at my willingness to give an apparently impossible 6000-year-old Earth a fair chance to verify itself) to some extent.

DT, I think that you are expressing a very common perception--that belief and doubt are essentially symmetric in nature.  My claim is that belief is the suppression of doubt, but not vice versa.  So I see a cognitive asymmetry there.  Think of the mind as a generator of propositions.  All propositions default to the position that they are false.  The mind then acquires belief in the truth by suppressing doubt.  What triggers the suppression of doubt may not even be rational, and children appear more able to suppress doubts than adults.  I would argue that we generally lose our ability to inhibit doubt (and perhaps other mental functions) as we grow older.  What I am ultimately aiming for here is to find a psychological motivation for burden of proof thinking.  Without it, we would all be hopelessly gullible, being unable to decide between truth and falsehood.  (Religious faith is a special case where we allow suppression of doubt to override our natural skepticism.)

What about script theory as an alternative explanation for how belief woks on a psychological...or rather congitive level?  I can see a few parallels to script theory in your suggestions, but...  I need to think through this more before continuing with my post  

Well, I'm very familiar with Schank's concept of scripts and similar techniques in natural language processing.  I've done a web search and discovered that psychologists have elaborated his ideas.  (While there are some very attractive things about Schank's ideas, there are also some serious flaws in terms of how cognition works.   I prefer Fillmore's frame semantics as an alternative to Schank, myself, but that may be because I'm an old student of Fillmore's.  )  So I'll have to learn more about what psychologists have had to say about frame theory.  I wasn't aware of the psychological literature on script theory, mainly just the linguistic literature.

Anyway, I'm not sure what parallels you see between my little idea here and script theory.  Script theory is mainly about template-filling, and it tends to suffer in how it handles granularity of semantic representations.  I'll have to give this more thought.

I was thinking in terms of the script theory (sometimes called life story theory) found in much...(maybe most?) psychoanalysis today.  I wasn't going much further with it than the idea of life experiences (past sensations, emotions attached with supressed or vivid life events, memories, etc.) shaping one's disposition toward an object, person, or value.

You are approaching it from a much higher level than I was.  I have discovered a psychological approach that might be closer to my very simplified analysis of beliefs and doubts--cognitive inhibition theory.  Inhibition (or suppression) is key to understanding my point, and I think that the cognitive inhibitionists might be approaching cognition from the same direction.  It's just that we tend to think in positive terms--beliefs rather than doubts.  So, to the extent that they talk about subjective belief systems, they probably think in terms of inhibiting beliefs rather than doubts. However, I have just really begun to look at their ideas, so I may have the wrong impression.

Scripts are more like theories, which one can think of as a web of beliefs (or suppressed doubts).  A theory is a contextual framework that influences how easy it is to inhibit doubts or relax inhibitions on doubts.  That is how I would express it in the context of my theory, anyway.  

This post came to mind as I was driving home yesterday and I thought of a related Bible passage.  In Mark 9, there is the account of a man whose son was "tormented by and evil spirit since birth."  From the decription, it sounds very much like seizures of some sort.  Anyway, there is quick dialogue between Jesus and the father.  The father says, "If you are willing you can make my son clean."  Jesus replies, "If I am willing?  Everything is possible for him who believes."

The man then says, "I do believe.  Help me overcome my unbelief."  So, I suppose the man was saying,  Help me suspend disbelief.

That's how I see it, too.  Doubt is easy and cheap, because it is our default way of thinking.  The effort comes in suppressing disbelief.  What will make you put the brakes on your natural skepticism?  This man is looking for a cure, and he wants to believe.  He just needs to get over that natural barrier--the speed bump on the way to credulity.  We have to knock down doubt in order to license our beliefs.  

All religions have elaborate methods for suppressing doubt.  Otherwise, they'd be dead in the water.  You don't have to convince Christians not to believe in Zeus, Quetzalcoatl, Marduk, or Vishnu.  They were never given experiences to license suppression of their doubts about those gods.  So their default skepticism is enough.  When I ask Christians why they don't believe in Zeus, a very common response is that they have no reason to.  It is a good response.  However, Christians often express surprise at how someone could not believe in God.  Their doubts in their own god have been well and truly beaten down.  To understand atheists, the first thing to understand is that the web of doubt suppression has been weakened or eliminated.  Default skepticism is firmly back in place.  The only question in an atheist's mind is what would license suppression of doubt.

This whole idea is interesting.  You certainly seems to make a very strong argument for the necessity of suspending disbelief in order to live and prosper.  It doesn't take much to see how this applies to having healthy and intimate relationships, forming disciplinary thinking, etc.

I think that inhibition or suppression is a fundamental aspect of cognition.  I can make a very good case that children learn to pronounce their native language by suppressing mispronunciations.  I think that much the same is true of the acquisition of any coordinated muscular behavior.  Suppression is key to any goal-oriented behavior.

Logically, I suppose I see why all of this leads you to define belief as supressed doubt.  I suppose that this part is more difficult form me becuase of my theological position that Christian belief is fundamentally a gift from God.  But, at this point, my only source for that theological position comes from my acceptance of the Bible as a source of divine revelation.

That's not a problem for me intellectually.  I consider myself a man of deep faith, albeit not religious faith.  Without faith, it would be impossible to make plans, and we wouldn't be able to navigate our lives without the ability to plan.  Faith is just suppressed doubt.  The issue is what causes us to suppress a doubt.  Your doubt in the Bible as a source of revelation has been beaten down.  Mine has not.  You judge it a good thing to inhibit that doubt.  I do not, although I think that religious faith can have survival advantages at times.  (And maybe that is why most of the human race accepts religion of one kind or another.  It could easily be a biological predisposition.)

You have provided some great food for thought.  Thanks for starting the thread!

Well, thanks for giving serious feedback.  It has made me think, and that is the whole point of these debates.

I never said that you said that we should strive to maintain doubt.  I just was observing that some people, in general, allow their doubts to control them to the point that they never investigate any new ideas.  Stephen King, in the Stand, writes about Fran's mom and how hard she became after her son's death.  He describes her as having put a layer of plaster of paris over herself and had been frozen in that state for years.  That's more what I'm speaking to.  I know people that refuse to even investigate something because, for whatever reason, they are unwilling to have their beliefs challenged.

I guess that I thought you were attempting to make a comment that was relevant to the topic discussion, rather than a random observation.     I certainly agree with you that many people are unwilling to have their beliefs challenged.  For example, in this forum, I have observed several people who would reject all scientific advances made in the past two millenia in order to cling to outmoded interpretations of the Bible.  They purport to "investigate" scientific discoveries, but only, it seems, to cherrypick statements that might be taken out of context to support their skewed interpretation of reality.  The idea that those who authored the Bible might have been mistaken and misguided cannot be contemplated.  They cling stubbornly to their faith in biblical inerrancy no matter how strong the evidence to contradict it.

I was just observing that your theory puts another piece into the puzzle, so to speak.  If we start with doubt, and something happens to a person that makes them unwilling to investigate anything, that person will be in everlasting ignorance.

If you go back over what I wrote, you'll see that this inference is incompatible with it.  What I said was there can be no belief without disbelief, not that people stubbornly resist suppressing disbelief.  Indeed, childhood is a time when it is easiest to suppress one's doubts.  That is essential to learning anything at all about the world.

It's like the old saying, "If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?"  

I suppose that one can say ignorance is not bliss.  It is downright dangerous.

I guess that I thought you were attempting to make a comment that was relevant to the topic discussion, rather than a random observation.    

Sorry, from now on I'll put a disclaimer when it's just a random observation distantly related to but not necessarily relevant to the discussion.

I certainly agree with you that many people are unwilling to have their beliefs challenged.  For example, in this forum, I have observed several people who would reject all scientific advances made in the past two millenia in order to cling to outmoded interpretations of the Bible.  They purport to "investigate" scientific discoveries, but only, it seems, to cherrypick statements that might be taken out of context to support their skewed interpretation of reality.  The idea that those who authored the Bible might have been mistaken and misguided cannot be contemplated.  They cling stubbornly to their faith in biblical inerrancy no matter how strong the evidence to contradict it.

Actually, I was thinking of my atheist mother's refusal to investigate Christianity. She, unlike the atheists on this forum , hasn't even read the bible and knows absolutely nothing about anything religious.  Hasn't exactly made an informed decision.

If you go back over what I wrote, you'll see that this inference is incompatible with it.  What I said was there can be no belief without disbelief, not that people stubbornly resist suppressing disbelief.  Indeed, childhood is a time when it is easiest to suppress one's doubts.  That is essential to learning anything at all about the world.

I realize that.  I guess I don't see how the two are incompatible.

I suppose that one can say ignorance is not bliss.  It is downright dangerous.

Here's another one of those not relevant things - my brain gets triggered by the familiar words I guess.
When I graduated from high school, my brother got me a card that said on the outside, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."  When opened it up, it said, "Congratulations, O Harmless One."  Brotherly love is a beautiful thing, isn't it?

Seriously, I agree completely that it's dangerous.  That's something I'm working to rectify in myself now.  I used to consider myself pretty informed...until this website.  I have years of reading to do.